TeleNav announced today that it has acquired Local Merchant Services, Inc., d.b.a. ThinkNear, a privately held hyper-local mobile advertising company located in Los Angeles, California, for consideration of $22.5 million. Telenav will combine ThinkNear's targeting technology with the existing Telenav Drive-To Advertising solution to create a new mobile local advertising platform called Scout Advertising. Here's more info on TeleNav's new Scout Advertising:

Scout Advertising will give brick and mortar companies the ability to better target and measure their mobile advertising initiatives. The new platform will target mobile consumers within 100 meters of any location, far closer than any other mobile ad network (most use zip code or DMA). It also takes into account context and what is happening around the consumer. So, for example, a sports memorabilia store can target an NFL fan with an advertisement for a nearby sale on branded jackets, blankets and umbrellas while the fan is tailgating on a cold and rainy day. Scout Advertising provides consumers with ads that are more relevant to their real-time needs and interests as they go about their day.

In addition, Scout Advertising combines with our Scout GPS navigation service to give mobile consumers turn-by-turn directions to the advertiser's retail locations. In turn, advertisers can measure "Drive-To rate" which tells them how many consumers actually took action to drive to their stores. This solves many problems that advertisers have measuring ROI on their mobile advertising spend.

You can get Scout, a location based POI and navigation tool for free on both the iTunes App Store and Google Play store. For more info visit www.telenav.com